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Wednesday, December 31, 2014

From Libcom.org: Excellent text by David Whitehouse examining the creation of the first police forces, which
took place in England and the US in just a few decades in the mid-19th
century. And explaining that they were not brought into being to prevent
crime or protect the public, but primarily to control crowds: the
working class, white and black.

In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades—roughly from 1825 to 1855.
The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and
it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most
common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the
invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it.

Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling
elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by
collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the
police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s

— strikes in England,
— riots in the Northern US,
— and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.

So the police are a response to crowds, not to crime.

I will be focusing a lot on who these crowds were, how they became
such a challenge. We’ll see that one difficulty for the rulers, besides
the growth of social polarization in the cities, was the breakdown of
old methods of personal supervision of the working population. In these
decades, the state stepped in to fill the social breach.

We’ll see that, in the North, the invention of the police was just
one part of a state effort to manage and shape the workforce on a
day-to-day basis. Governments also expanded their systems of poor relief
in order to regulate the labor market, and they developed the system of
public education to regulate workers’ minds. I will connect those
points to police work later on, but mostly I’ll be focusing on how the
police developed in London, New York, Charleston (South Carolina), and
Philadelphia.

Continued at http://libcom.org/history/origins-police-david-whitehouse